Bill would regulate use of automatic license-plate readers

BOSTON -- Over the last few years, particularly in bigger cities, traffic cameras have become commonplace. Run a red light and your picture gets taken and you get a ticket in the mail.

But even if you obey the law, your information may still be recorded.

Recently on Beacon Hill, legislators heard testimony on a bill to regulate and restrict the use of automatic license plate readers or "ALPRs" -- camera devices that can be mounted anywhere from toll booths to repossession vehicles to scan license plates and record car locations.

"There is no law in Massachusetts that regulates their use," said the bill's sponsor Sen. Cynthia Creem, D-Newton. Most municipalities using ALPRs don't even have written policies regulating their use, she said.

License plate readers may be more common in larger metropolitan areas such as Boston, but they're also used in many smaller municipalities, including Lowell, Chelmsford and Tewksbury.

According to documents obtained by the American Civil Liberties Union of Massachusetts, the Lowell Police Department had a single license plate reader as of 2010 and were applying for grant funding for at least one more to be mounted on a police vehicle.

"The (Lowell Police Department) has extensive experience with ALPR equipment," according to these documents. Timothy Crowley, the lieutenant-in-charge of the Traffic Division, was serving as the "ALPR administrator" at the time.

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"At the conclusion of each ALPR deployment, the (lieutenant) downloads all the license plate numbers that were scanned throughout the deployment into a database on his computer. Therefore, the (Lowell Police Department) is able to keep track of every license plate scanned during each deployment," according to the documents.

It is unclear from the documents whether Lowell police have a written policy on license plate reader data privacy, how long it is retained, or data sharing with other agencies. Lowell police did not respond to requests for comment for this story.

According to documents obtained by the American Civil Liberties Union of Massachusetts, the Lowell Police Department had a single license plate reader as of 2010 and were applying for grant funding from the state's Executive Office of Public Safety and Security for another to be mounted on a police vehicle.

The lieutenant in charge of the department's Traffic Division, according to the documents, would input all information gathered into a database after each ALPR deployment, maintaining records "including the license plate number, a picture of the vehicle, details including color, make and model, as well as exactly where the car was when it was scanned."

"In addition to being extremely useful for identifying motor vehicle violations, the ALPR can also assist the (Lowell police) to track down individuals," according to the grant application.

It is unclear from the documents whether the Lowell police have a written policy on license plate reader data privacy, how long it is retained, or data sharing with other agencies. Lowell police did not respond to requests for comment for this story.

In Chelmsford, according to documents obtained by the ACLUM, police planned to purchase a license plate reader in early 2011 with grant funding, to "be deployed 24 hours a day, seven days a week."

Chelmsford Police Lt. Colin Spence said the department now has three license plate readers, including two acquired last year. He said the department has a policy in place regarding retention of ALPR data.

"We only keep it for 30 days," Spence said. He said he didn't think the department's use of license plate readers raises privacy concerns.

"It's very limited what the license plate reader addresses," Spence said. "It really is a secondary tool that the officers use."

The Tewksbury Police Department did not respond to requests for comment for this story.

At the recent hearing on the state Senate ALPR bill, concerns were raised about how data from the devices is used.

"You really don't have to be much of a conspiracy theorist to imagine possible abuses of that data, especially without any statutory protection," Creem said.

Rep. Jonathan Hecht, D-Watertown, cited similar concerns as his reasons for sponsoring the House version of the ALPR bill. "We have no law in this area at all," he said, "and where there's no law it's the law of the jungle, basically."

Private companies are another concern. They aggregate massive amounts of license plate data, selling it to everyone from government agencies to banks. The CEO of one such company, Chris Metaxas of Digital Recognition Network, testified against the ALPR bill at the recent hearing.

"There is absolutely no expectation of privacy in a license plate. It contains no personal nor identifiable information," he said.

"LPR technology is simply photography," Metaxas added. "LPR technology stores these pictures, just like today people store pictures like they do on Instagram, which are available for all to see."

Digital Recognition Network stores up to 50 million license plate locations per month, with a total of more than 700 million records in their database as of last July, according to an ACLU report. ACLU of Massachusetts Executive Director Carol Rose said there's a difference between taking a single license plate picture and collecting millions, which allows for tracking people's movements.

"It's fundamentally different than the fact that there could be someone on the street who sees your car drive by," Rose said, "when we have automatic -- whether through drones or license plate readers -- people just scooping up and keeping this information forever."

Metaxas testified, however, that strict legal guidelines exist under the federal Driver's Privacy Protection Act about who can pay to access Digital Recognition Network's database.

"We believe that your bills should enforce laws that are already in place, enforce the DPPA standards and make them more visible so people are held accountable against those standards," he said.

He called the Senate ALPR bill "a reaction to misinformation and scare tactics."

Hecht said there are legitimate law enforcement uses of ALPRs, but stressed the importance of looking at "how we balance the interests of these businesses that have gotten into this area with the privacy concerns of our constituents."

It matters, he said, who has access to the vast amounts of sensitive data.

"In private hands, of course, they're interested in selling it, so they're going to be looking for markets," Hecht said.

The hearing on the Senate version of the ALPR bill came just two weeks after the Washington Post reported that the Department of Homeland Security was soliciting a private contractor to operate a national license plate tracking database.

Some see the ALPR regulation bill as not going far enough.

"It's not going to make any difference," said Urszula Masny-Latos, executive director of the National Lawyers Guild's Massachusetts branch. "You can regulate use of cameras, but we have no ability to really make sure that law is enforced."

Creem and Hecht pointed out that the Boston police suspended their license plate reader program in December, after it was revealed they had accidentally released more than 68,000 license plate numbers gathered through ALPRs to the Boston Globe, which according to their own rules should've been redacted.

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